Review: Dark Harvest

It is likely that this 2023 release flew under your radar, but there is a lot of charm to this version of a familiar story set on Halloween night, 1962.

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Greek mythology has provided us with so many of the story archetypes that we still recycle to this day. One of the most persistent, especially in modern pop culture, is the story of Theseus and the Minotaur. If you're unaware, it involves a tradition in which a set number of young people are sent into a labyrinth to do battle with (and ultimately die at the hands of) a half-man, half-bull creature every seven years. If you have read or watched Battle Royale, or The Hunger Games, or The Long Walk, or any other story where young people are offered as tribute to some violent spectacle, you have experienced the long-standing impact of this story.* Dark Harvest, a modestly budgeted and marketed horror adaptation from a couple of years ago continues the tradition. For whatever reason, we can't seem to get enough content about established power structures sacrificing children in violent fashion to maintain that power, and that is very much what this movie is about. In the film's universe, a small midwest town has an annual tradition where the (white, male) high school seniors are starved for three days before Halloween, and then set out into the streets with makeshift weapons to hunt down a supernatural scarecrow creature, Sawtooth Jack, before it reaches the local church at midnight. Failure to do so, which seems to have happened only once, will supposedly lead to a blight on their crops and choking dust overtaking the town for the whole year. The winner is celebrated as a hero and their family handsomely compensated, and the inevitible casualties are brushed aside as the cost of keeping the town prosperous.

I could see Dark Harvest making my horror viewing rotation - maybe not every year, but at least every few. It has a really fun vibe that is somewhere between a (good) Stephen King movie and Trick R' Treat, The setting is fun (early 60's, small town America) and the filmmaking is very solid, with none of the pitfalls that smaller budget films can easily fall into. The script and actors give you very clear rooting interests, and like most stories of this stripe, you are rooting for them to not only win the contest but to dismantle the power structure that enables the contest to occur. If I am docking points, I dislike the use of CGI on some of the kills, where red dye and corn syrup are still exponentially more effective than computer generated blood splatter. The CGI for Sawtooth Jack is also not world-class, but it is passable and ultimately pretty good for a film of this budget. Overall, at a tight 96 minutes, the film tells a tight, compelling story with some fun action and an interesting monster. Despite the commonality it has with all of the other Theseus-inspired fiction, the application of the basic story structure is interesting and novel, and the twists and turns it takes are satisfying. I'm looking forward to revisiting Dark Harvest in the future, and I recommend you give it a shot yourself.

*Really, you could make the case that this also applies to Cabin in the Woods, and by extension, horror movies in general. And of course, it is impossible to know what properties were inspired by the Minotaur story and which ones were inspired by other stories that were inspired by the Minotaur story - Battle Royale, in particular, seems to be cited most frequently as the source of inspiration for what came after. Its also impossible to know what came before Theseus that inspired that particular myth to begin with. Once our AI starts training predominately on other AI, all this lineage of inspiration stuff will become so complicated and mushed together, none of it will be traceable any more anyway.